They say that when King George was dying, a special form of prayer for
his recovery, composed by one of the Archbishops, was read aloud to him
and that His Majesty, after saying Amen 'thrice, with great fervour,'
begged that his thanks might be conveyed to its author. To the student
of royalty in modern times there is something rather suggestive in this
incident. I like to think of the drug-scented room at Windsor and of the
King, livid and immobile among his pillows, waiting, in superstitious
awe, for the near moment when he must stand, a spirit, in the presence
of a perpetual King. I like to think of him following the futile prayer
with eyes and lips, and then, custom resurgent in him and a touch of
pride that, so long as the blood moved ever so little in his veins,
he was still a king, expressing a desire that the dutiful feeling and
admirable taste of the Prelate should receive a suitable acknowledgment.
It would have been impossible for a real monarch like George, even after
the gout had turned his thoughts heavenward, really to abase himself
before his Maker. But he could, so to say, treat with Him, as he might
have treated with a fellow-sovereign, in a formal way, long after
diplomacy was quite useless. How strange it must be to be a king! How
delicate and difficult a task it is to judge him! So far as I know,
no attempt has been made to judge King George the Fourth fairly. The
hundred and one eulogies and lampoons, irresponsibly published during
and immediately after his reign, are not worth a wooden hoop in Hades.
Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has published a history of George's reign, in which
he has so artistically subordinated his own personality to his subject,
that I can scarcely find, from beginning to end of the two bulky
volumes, a single opinion expressed, a single idea, a single deduction
from the admirably-ordered facts. All that most of us know of George
is from Thackeray's brilliant denunciation. Now, I yield to few in my
admiration of Thackeray's powers. He had a charming style. We never
find him searching for the mot juste as for a needle in a bottle of hay.
Could he have looked through a certain window by the river at Croisset
or in the quadrangle at Brasenose, how he would have laughed! He blew on
his pipe, and words came tripping round him, like children, like pretty
little children who are perfectly drilled for the dance, or came, did he
will it, treading in their precedence, like kings, gloomily. And I think
it is to the credit of the reading mob that, by reason of his beautiful
style, all that he said was taken for the truth, without questioning.
But truth after all is eternal, and style transient, and now that
Thackeray's style is becoming, if I may say so, a trifle 1860, it may
not be amiss that we should inquire whether his estimate of George is in
substance and fact worth anything at all. It seems to me that, as in his
novels, so in his history of the four Georges, Thackeray made no attempt
at psychology. He dealt simply with types. One George he insisted upon
regarding as a buffoon, another as a yokel. The Fourth George he chose
to hold up for reprobation as a drunken, vapid cad. Every action, every
phase of his life that went to disprove this view, he either suppressed
or distorted utterly. 'History,' he would seem to have chuckled, 'has
nothing to do with the First Gentleman. But I will give him a niche in
Natural History. He shall be King of the Beasts.' He made no allowance
for the extraordinary conditions under which all monarchs live, none for
the unfortunate circumstances by which George, especially, was from the
first hampered. He judged him as he judged Barnes Newcome and all the
scoundrels lie created. Moreover, he judged him by the moral standard of
the Victorian Age. In fact, he applied to his subject the wrong method,
in the wrong manner, and at the wrong time. And yet every one has taken
him at his word. I feel that my essay may be scouted as a paradox; but
I hope that many may recognise that I am not, out of mere boredom,
endeavouring to stop my ears against popular platitude, but rather, in
a spirit of real earnestness, to point out to the mob how it has been
cruel to George. I do not despair of success. I think I shall make
converts. The mob is really very fickle and sometimes cheers the truth.
None, at all events, will deny that England stands to-day otherwise
than she stood a hundred and thirty-two years ago, when George was born.
To-day we are living a decadent life. All the while that we are
prating of progress, we are really so deteriorate! There is nothing but
feebleness in us. Our youths, who spend their days in trying to build
up their constitutions by sport or athletics and their evenings in
undermining them with poisonous and dyed drinks; our daughters, who are
ever searching for some new quack remedy for new imaginary megrim, what
strength is there in them? We have our societies for the prevention of
this and the promotion of that and the propagation of the other,
because there are no individuals among us. Our sexes are already nearly
assimilate. Women are becoming nearly as rare as ladies, and it is only
at the music-halls that we are privileged to see strong men. We are born
into a poor, weak age. We are not strong enough to be wicked, and the
Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.
But this was not so in the days when George was walking by his tutor's
side in the gardens of Kew or of Windsor. London must have been a
splendid place in those days--full of life and colour and wrong and
revelry. There was no absurd press nor vestry to protect the poor at the
expense of the rich and see that everything should be neatly adjusted.
Every man had to shift for himself and, consequently, men were, as Mr.
Clement Scott would say, manly, and women, as Mr. Clement Scott would
say, womanly. In those days, a young man of wealth and family found
open to him a vista of such licence as had been unknown to any since
the barbatuli of the Roman Empire. To spend the early morning with his
valet, gradually assuming the rich apparel that was not then tabooed
by a hard sumptuary standard; to saunter round to White's for ale and
tittle-tattle and the making of wagers; to attend a 'drunken déjeuner'
in honour of 'la très belle Rosaliné or the Strappini; to drive some
fellow-fool far out into the country in his pretty curricle, 'followed
by two well-dressed and well-mounted grooms, of singular elegance
certainly,' and stop at every tavern on the road to curse the host for
not keeping better ale and a wench of more charm; to reach St. James's
in time for a random toilet and so off to dinner. Which of our dandies
could survive a day of pleasure such as this? Which would be ready,
dinner done, to scamper off again to Ranelagh and dance and skip and sup
in the rotunda there? Yet the youth of that period would not dream
of going to bed or ever he had looked in at Crockford's--tanta lubido
rerum--for a few hours' faro.
This was the kind of life that young George found opened to him, when,
at length, in his nineteenth year, they gave him an establishment in
Buckingham House. How his young eyes must have sparkled, and with what
glad gasps must he have taken the air of freedom into his lungs!
Rumour had long been busy with the damned surveillance under which his
childhood had been passed. A paper of the time says significantly that
'the Prince of Wales, with a spirit which does him honour, has three
times requested a change in that system.' King George had long postponed
permission for his son to appear at any balls, and the year before had
only given it, lest he should offend the Spanish Minister, who begged
it as a personal favour. I know few pictures more pathetic than that of
George, then an overgrown boy of fourteen, tearing the childish frill
from around his neck and crying to one of the Royal servants, 'See how
they treat me! 'Childhood has always seemed to me the tragic period of
life. To be subject to the most odious espionage at the one age when you
never dream of doing wrong, to be deceived by your parents, thwarted of
your smallest wish, oppressed by the terrors of manhood and of the world
to come, and to believe, as you are told, that childhood is the only
happiness known; all this is quite terrible. And all Royal children,
of whom I have read, particularly George, seem to have passed through
greater trials in childhood than do the children of any other class.
Mr. Fitzgerald, hazarding for once an opinion, thinks that 'the
stupid, odious, German, sergeant-system of discipline that had been so
rigorously applied was, in fact, responsible for the blemishes of the
young Prince's character.' Even Thackeray, in his essay upon George III.,
asks what wonder that the son, finding himself free at last, should have
plunged, without looking, into the vortex of dissipation. In Torrens'
Life of Lord Melbourne we learn that Lord Essex, riding one day with the
King, met the young Prince wearing a wig, and that the culprit, being
sternly reprimanded by his father, replied that he had 'been ordered
by his doctor to wear a wig, for he was subject to cold.' Whereupon the
King, to vent the aversion he already felt for his son, or, it may have
been, glorying in the satisfactory result of his discipline, turned to
Lord Essex and remarked, 'A lie is ever ready when it is wanted.' George
never lost this early-ingrained habit of lies. It is to George's childish
fear of his guardians that we must trace that extraordinary power
of bamboozling his courtiers, his ministry, and his mistresses that
distinguished him through his long life. It is characteristic of the man
that he should himself have bitterly deplored his own untruthfulness.
When, in after years, he was consulting Lady Spencer upon the choice of
a governess for his child, he made this remarkable speech, 'Above all,
she must be taught the truth. You know that I don't speak the truth and
my brothers don't, and I find it a great defect, from which I would have
my daughter free. We have been brought up badly, the Queen having taught
us to equivocate.' You may laugh at the picture of the little chubby,
curly-headed fellows learning to equivocate at their mother's knee, but
pray remember that the wisest master of ethics himself, in his theory
of hexeis apodeiktikai, similarly raised virtues, such as telling the
truth, to the level of regular accomplishments, and, before you judge
poor George harshly in his entanglements of lying, think of the cruelly
unwise education he had undergone.
However much we may deplore this exaggerated tyranny, by reason of
its evil effect upon his moral nature, we cannot but feel glad that it
existed, to afford a piquant contrast to the life awaiting him. Had he
passed through the callow dissipations of Eton and Oxford, like other
young men of his age, he would assuredly have lacked much of that
splendid, pent vigour with which he rushed headlong into London life.
He was so young and so handsome and so strong, that can we wonder if all
the women fell at his feet? 'The graces of his person,' says one whom he
honoured by an intrigue, 'the irresistible sweetness of his smile, the
tenderness of his melodious, yet manly voice, will be remembered by me
till every vision of this changing scene are forgotten. The polished
and fascinating ingenuousness of his manners contributed not a little
to enliven our promenade. He sang with exquisite taste, and the tones of
his voice, breaking on the silence of the night, have often appeared
to my entranced senses like more than mortal melody.' But besides his
graces of person, he had a most delightful wit, he was a scholar who
could bandy quotations with Fox or Sheridan, and, like the young men
of to-day, he knew all about Art. He spoke French, Italian, and German
perfectly. Crossdill had taught him the violoncello. At first, as was
right for one of his age, he cared more for the pleasures of the table
and of the ring, for cards and love. He was wont to go down to Ranelagh
surrounded by a retinue of bruisers--rapscallions, such as used to
follow Clodius through the streets of Rome--and he loved to join in the
scuffles like any commoner. Pugilism he learnt from Angelo, and he was
considered by some to be a fine performer. On one occasion, too, at an
exposition d'escrime, when he handled the foils against the maître, he
'was highly complimented upon his graceful postures.' In fact, despite
all his accomplishments, he seems to have been a thoroughly manly young
fellow. He was just the kind of figure-head Society had long been in
need of. A certain lack of tone had crept into the amusements of the
haut monde, due, doubtless, to the lack of an acknowledged leader. The
King was not yet mad, but he was always bucolic, and socially out of the
question. So at the coming of his son Society broke into a gallop.
Balls and masquerades were given in his honour night after night.
Good Samaritans must have approved when they found that at these
entertainments great ladies and courtesans brushed beautiful shoulders
in utmost familiarity, but those who delighted in the high charm of
society probably shook their heads. We need not, however, find it a flaw
in George's social bearing that he did not check this kind of freedom. At
the first, as a young man full of life, of course he took everything as
it came, joyfully. No one knew better than he did, in later life, that
there is a time for laughing with great ladies and a time for laughing
with courtesans. But as yet it was not possible for him to exert
influence. How great that influence became I will suggest hereafter.
I like to think of him as he was at this period, charging about, in
pursuit of pleasure, like a young bull. The splendid taste for building
had not yet come to him. His father would not hear of him patronising
the Turf. But already he was implected with a passion for dress and
seems to have erred somewhat on the side of dressing up, as is the way
of young men. It is fearful to think of him, as Cyrus Redding saw
him, 'arrayed in deep-brown velvet, silver embroidered, with cut-steel
buttons, and a gold net thrown over all.' Before that 'gold net thrown
over all,' all the mistakes of his afterlife seem to me to grow almost
insignificant. Time, however, toned his too florid sense of costume, and
we should at any rate be thankful that his imagination never deserted
him. All the delightful munditiae that we find in the contemporary
'fashion-plates for gentlemen' can be traced to George himself. His
were the much-approved 'quadruple stock of great dimension,' the 'cocked
grey-beaver,' 'the pantaloons of mauve silk negligently crinkled' and
any number of other little pomps and foibles of the kind. As he grew
older and was obliged to abandon many of his more vigorous pastimes, he
grew more and more enamoured of the pleasures of the wardrobe. He would
spend hours, it is said, in designing coats for his friends, liveries
for his servants, and even uniforms. Nor did he ever make the mistake of
giving away outmoded clothes to his valets, but kept them to form what
must have been the finest collection of clothes that has been seen in
modern times. With a sentimentality that is characteristic of him, he
would often, as he sat, crippled by gout, in his room at Windsor, direct
his servant to bring him this or that coat, which he had worn ten or
twenty or thirty years before, and, when it was brought to him, spend
much time in laughing or sobbing over the memories that lay in its
folds. It is pleasant to know that George, during his long and various
life, never forgot a coat, however long ago worn, however seldom.
But in the early days of which I speak he had not yet touched that
self-conscious note which, in manner and mode of life, as well as in
costume, he was to touch later. He was too violently enamoured of all
around him, to think very deeply of himself. But he had already realised
the tragedy of the voluptuary, which is, after a little time, not that
he must go on living, but that he cannot live in two places at once.
We have, at this end of the century, tempered this tragedy by the
perfection of railways, and it is possible for our good Prince, whom
Heaven bless, to waken to the sound of the Braemar bagpipes, while the
music of Mdlle. Guilbert's latest song, cooed over the footlights of
the Concerts Parisiens, still rings in his ears. But in the time of our
Prince's illustrious great-uncle there were not railways; and we find
George perpetually driving, for wagers, to Brighton and back (he had
already acquired that taste for Brighton which was one of his most
loveable qualities) in incredibly short periods of time. The rustics
who lived along the road were well accustomed to the sight of a high,
tremulous phaeton flashing past them, and the crimson face of the
young Prince bending over the horses. There is something absurd in
representing George as, even before he came of age, a hardened and
cynical profligate, an Elagabalus in trousers. His blood flowed fast
enough through his veins. All his escapades were those of a healthful
young man of the time. Need we blame him if he sought, every day, to
live faster and more fully?
In a brief essay like this, I cannot attempt to write, as I hope one day
to do, in any detail a history of George's career, during the time when
he was successively Prince of Wales and Regent and King. Merely is it my
wish at present to examine some of the principal accusations that have
been brought against him, and to point out in what ways he has been
harshly and hastily judged. Perhaps the greatest indignation against
him was, and is to this day, felt by reason of his treatment of his two
wives, Mrs. Fitzherbert and Queen Caroline. There are some scandals that
never grow old, and I think the story of George's married life is one of
them. It was a real scandal. I can feel it. It has vitality. Often have
I wondered whether the blood with which the young Prince's shirt was
saturate when Mrs. Fitzherbert was first induced to visit him at Carlton
House, was merely red paint, or if, in a frenzy of love, he had truly
gashed himself with a razor. Certain it is that his passion for the
virtuous and obdurate lady was a very real one. Lord Holland describes
how the Prince used to visit Mrs. Fox, and there indulge in 'the most
extravagant expressions and actions--rolling on the floor, striking his
forehead, tearing his hair, falling into hysterics, and swearing that he
would abandon the country, forego the crown, &c.' He was indeed still
a child, for Royalties, not being ever brought into contact with the
realities of life, remain young far longer than other people. Cursed
with a truly royal lack of self-control, he was unable to bear the
idea of being thwarted in any wish. Every day he sent off couriers to
Holland, whither Mrs. Fitzherbert had retreated, imploring her to return
to him, offering her formal marriage. At length, as we know, she yielded
to his importunity and returned. It is difficult indeed to realise
exactly what was Mrs. Fitzherbert's feeling in the matter. The marriage
must be, as she knew, illegal, and would lead, as Charles James Fox
pointed out in his powerful letter to the Prince, to endless and
intricate difficulties. For the present she could only live with him as
his mistress. If, when he reached the legal age of twenty-five, he were
to apply to Parliament for permission to marry her, how could permission
be given, when she had been living with him irregularly? Doubtless, she
was flattered by the attentions of the Heir to the Throne, but, had she
really returned his passion, she would surely have preferred 'any other
species of connection with His Royal Highness to one leading to so much
misery and mischief.' Really to understand her marriage, one must look
at the portraits of her that are extant. That beautiful and silly face
explains much. One can well fancy such a lady being pleased to live
after the performance of a mock-ceremony with a prince for whom she felt
no passion. Her view of the matter can only have been social, for,
in the eyes of the Church, she could only live with the Prince as his
mistress. Society, however, once satisfied that a ceremony of some kind
had been enacted, never regarded her as anything but his wife. The day
after Fox, inspired by the Prince, had formally denied that any ceremony
had taken place, 'the knocker of her door,' to quote her own complacent
phrase, 'was never still.' The Duchesses of Portland, Devonshire and
Cumber-land were among her visitors.
How much pop-limbo has been talked about the Prince's denial of the
marriage! I grant that it was highly improper to marry Mrs. Fitzherbert
at all. But George was always weak and wayward, and he did, in his great
passion, marry her. That he should afterwards deny it officially seems
to me to have been utterly inevitable. His denial did her not the
faintest damage, as I have pointed out. It was, so to speak, an official
quibble, rendered necessary by the circumstances of the case. Not to
have denied the marriage in the House of Commons would have meant ruin
to both of them. As months passed, more serious difficulties awaited the
unhappily wedded pair. What boots it to repeat the story of the Prince's
great debts and desperation? It was clear that there was but one way
of getting his head above water, and that was to yield to his father's
wishes and contract a real marriage with a foreign princess. Fate was
dogging his footsteps relentlessly. Placed as he was, George could not
but offer to marry as his father willed. It is well, also, to remember
that George was not ruthlessly and suddenly turning his shoulder upon
Mrs. Fitzherbert. For some time before the British plenipotentiary went
to fetch him a bride from over the waters, his name had been associated
with that of the beautiful and unscrupulous Countess of Jersey.
Poor George! Half-married to a woman whom he no longer worshipped,
compelled to marry a woman whom he was to hate at first sight! Surely
we should not judge a prince harshly. 'Princess Caroline very gauche
at cards,' 'Princess Caroline very missish at supper,' are among the
entries made in his diary by Lord Malmesbury, while he was at the little
German Court. I can conceive no scene more tragic than that of her
presentation to the Prince, as related by the same nobleman. 'I,
according to the established etiquette,' so he writes, 'introduced
the Princess Caroline to him. She, very properly, in consequence of my
saying it was the right mode of proceeding, attempted to kneel to him.
He raised her gracefully enough, and embraced her, said barely one word,
turned round, retired to a distant part of the apartment, and calling
to me, said: 'Harris, I am not well: pray get me a glass of brandy.' At
dinner that evening, in the presence of her betrothed, the Princess
was 'flippant, rattling, affecting wit.' Poor George, I say again!
Deportment was his ruling passion, and his bride did not know how to
behave. Vulgarity--hard, implacable, German vulgarity--was in everything
she did to the very day of her death. The marriage was solemnised on
Wednesday, April 8th, 1795, and the royal bridegroom was drunk.
So soon as they were separated, George became implected with a morbid
hatred for his wife, which was hardly in accord with his light and
variant nature and shows how bitterly he had been mortified by his
marriage of necessity. It is sad that so much of his life should have
been wasted in futile strainings after divorce. Yet we can scarcely
blame him for seizing upon every scrap of scandal that was whispered of
his wife. Besides his not unnatural wish to be free, it was derogatory
to the dignity of a prince and a regent that his wife should be living
an eccentric life at Blackheath with a family of singers named Sapio.
Indeed, Caroline's conduct during this time was as indiscreet as ever.
Wherever she went she made ribald jokes about her husband, 'in such a
voice that all, by-standing, might hear.' 'After dinner,' writes one of
her servants, 'Her Royal Highness made a wax figure as usual, and gave
it an amiable pair of large horns; then took three pins out of her
garment and stuck them through and through, and put the figure to roast
and melt at the fire. What a silly piece of spite! Yet it is impossible
not to laugh when one sees it done.' Imagine the feelings of the
First Gentleman in Europe when the unseemly story of these pranks was
whispered to him!
For my own part, I fancy Caroline was innocent of any infidelity to her
unhappy husband. But that is neither here nor there. Her behaviour was
certainly not above suspicion. It fully justified George in trying to
establish a case for her divorce. When, at length, she went abroad, her
vagaries were such that the whole of her English suite left her, and we
hear of her travelling about the Holy Land attended by another family,
named Bergami. When her husband succeeded to the throne, and her name
was struck out of the liturgy, she despatched expostulations in absurd
English to Lord Liverpool. Receiving no answer, she decided to return
and claim her right to be crowned Queen of England. Whatever the unhappy
lady did, she always was ridiculous. One cannot but smile as one reads
of her posting along the French roads in a yellow travelling-chariot
drawn by cart-horses, with a retinue that included an alderman, a
reclaimed lady-in-waiting, an Italian count, the eldest son of the
alderman, and 'a fine little female child, about three years old, whom
Her Majesty, in conformity with her benevolent practices on former
occasions, had adopted.' The breakdown of her impeachment, and her
acceptance of an income formed a fitting anti-climax to the terrible
absurdities of her position. She died from the effects of a chill caught
when she was trying vainly to force a way to her husband's coronation.
Unhappy woman! Our sympathy for her is not misgiven. Fate wrote her a
most tremendous tragedy, and she played it in tights. Let us pity her,
but not forget to pity her husband, the King, also.
It is another common accusation against George that he was an undutiful
and unfeeling son. If this was so, it is certain that not all the blame
is to be laid upon him alone. There is more than one anecdote which
shows that King George disliked his eldest son, and took no trouble to
conceal his dislike, long before the boy had been freed from his tutors.
It was the coldness of his father and the petty restrictions he loved to
enforce that first drove George to seek the companionship of such men as
Egalité and the Duke of Cumberland, both of whom were quick to inflame
his impressionable mind to angry resentment. Yet, when Margaret
Nicholson attempted the life of the King, the Prince immediately posted
off from Brighton that he might wait upon his father at Windsor--a
graceful act of piety that was rewarded by his father's refusal to see
him. Hated by the Queen, who at this time did all she could to keep her
husband and his son apart, surrounded by intriguers, who did all they
could to set him against his father, George seems to have behaved with
great discretion. In the years that follow, I can conceive no position
more difficult than that in which he found himself every time his father
relapsed into lunacy. That he should have by every means opposed those
who through jealousy stood between him and the regency was only natural.
It cannot be said that at any time did he show anxiety to rule, so
long as there was any immediate chance of the King's recovery. On the
contrary, all impartial seers of that chaotic Court agreed that the
Prince bore himself throughout the intrigues, wherein he himself was
bound to be, in a notably filial way.
There are many things that I regret in the career of George IV., and
what I most of all regret is the part that he played in the politics of
the period. Englishmen to-day have at length decided that Royalty shall
not set foot in the political arena. I do not despair that some day we
shall place politics upon a sound commercial basis, as they have already
done in America and France, or leave them entirely in the hands of the
police, as they do in Russia. It is horrible to think that, under our
existing régime, all the men of noblest blood and highest intellect
should waste their time in the sordid atmosphere of the House of
Commons, listening for hours to nonentities talking nonsense, or
searching enormous volumes to prove that somebody said something some
years ago that does not quite tally with something he said the other
day, or standing tremulous before the whips in the lobbies and the
scorpions in the constituencies. In the political machine are crushed
and lost all our best men. That Mr. Gladstone did not choose to be a
cardinal is a blow under which the Roman Catholic Church still staggers.
In Mr. Chamberlain Scotland Yard missed its smartest detective. What a
fine voluptuary might Lord Rosebery have been! It is a platitude that
the country is ruled best by the permanent officials, and I look forward
to the time when Mr. Keir Hardie shall hang his cap in the hall of
No. 10 Downing Street, and a Conservative working man shall lead Her
Majesty's Opposition. In the lifetime of George, politics were not a
whit finer than they are to-day. I feel a genuine indignation that he
should have wasted so much of tissue in mean intrigues about ministries
and bills. That he should have been fascinated by that splendid fellow,
Fox, is quite right. That he should have thrown himself with all his
heart into the storm of the Westminster election is most natural. But it
is awful inverideed to find him, long after he had reached man's estate,
indulging in back-stair intrigues with Whigs and Tories. It is, of
course, absurd to charge him with deserting his first friends, the
Whigs. His love and fidelity were given, not to the Whigs, but to the
men who led them. Even after the death of Fox, he did, in misplaced
piety, do all he could for Fox's party. What wonder that, when he found
he was ignored by the Ministry that owed its existence to him, he turned
his back upon that sombre couple, the 'Lords G. and G.,' whom he had
always hated, and went over to the Tories? Among the Tories he hoped to
find men who would faithfully perform their duties and leave him leisure
to live his own beautiful life. I regret immensely that his part in
politics did not cease here. The state of the country and of his own
finances, and also, I fear, a certain love that he had imbibed for
political manipulation, prevented him from standing aside. How useless
was all the finesse he displayed in the long-drawn question of Catholic
Emancipation! How lamentable his terror of Lord Wellesley's rude
dragooning! And is there not something pitiable in the thought of the
Regent at a time of ministerial complications lying prone on his bed
with a sprained ankle, and taking, as was whispered, in one day as many
as seven hundred drops of laudanum? Some said he took these doses to
deaden the pain. But others, and among them his brother Cumberland,
declared that the sprain was all a sham. I hope it was. The thought of
a voluptuary in pain is very terrible. In any case, I cannot but feel
angry, for George's own sake and that of his kingdom, that he found
it impossible to keep further aloof from the wearisome troubles of
political life. His wretched indecision of character made him an easy
prey to unscrupulous ministers, while his extraordinary diplomatic
powers and almost extravagant tact made them, in their turn, an easy
prey to him. In these two processes much of his genius was spent
untimely. I must confess that he did not quite realise where his duties
ended. He wished always to do too much. If you read his repeated appeals
to his father that he might be permitted to serve actively in the
British army against the French, you will acknowledge that it was
through no fault of his own that he did not fight. It touches me to
think that in his declining years he actually thought that he had led
one of the charges at Waterloo. He would often describe the whole scene
as it appeared to him at that supreme moment, and refer to the Duke of
Wellington, saying, 'Was it not so, Duke?' 'I have often heard you say
so, your Majesty,' the old soldier would reply, grimly. I am not sure
that the old soldier was at Waterloo himself. In a room full of
people he once referred to the battle as having been won upon the
playing-fields of Eton. This was certainly a most unfortunate slip,
seeing that all historians are agreed that it was fought on a certain
field situate a few miles from Brussels.
In one of his letters to the King, craving for a military appointment,
George urges that, whilst his next brother, the Duke of York, commanded
the army, and the younger branches of the family were either generals
or lieutenant-generals, he, who was Prince of Wales, remained colonel of
dragoons. And herein, could he have known it, lay the right limitation
of his life. As Royalty was and is constituted, it is for the younger
sons to take an active part in the services, whilst the eldest son is
left as the ruler of Society. Thousands and thousands of guineas were
given by the nation that the Prince of Wales, the Regent, the King,
might be, in the best sense of the word, ornamental. It is not for
us, at this moment, to consider whether Royalty, as a wholly Pagan
institution, is not out of place in a community of Christians. It is
enough that we should inquire whether the god, whom our grand-fathers
set up and worshipped and crowned with offerings, gave grace to his
worshippers.
That George was a moral man, in our modern sense, I do not for one
moment pretend. It were idle to deny that he was profligate. When he
died there were found in one of his cabinets more than a hundred locks
of women's hair. Some of these were still plastered with powder and
pomatum, some were mere little golden curls, such as grow low down
upon a girl's neck, others were streaked with grey. The whole of this
collection subsequently passed into the hands of Adam, the famous Scotch
henchman of the Regent. In his family, now resident in Glasgow, it is
treasured as an heirloom. I myself have been privileged to look at all
these locks of hair, and I have seen a clairvoyante take them one by
one, and, pinching them between her lithe fingers, tell of the love
that each symbolised. I have heard her tell of long rides by night, of a
boudoir hung with grass-green satin, and of a tryst at Windsor; of one,
the wife of a hussar at York, whose little lap-dog used to bark angrily
whenever the Regent came near his mistress; of a milkmaid who, in her
great simpleness, thought her child would one day be King of England;
of an arch-duchess with blue eyes, and a silly little flautist from
Portugal; of women that were wantons and fought for his favour, great
ladies that he loved dearly, girls that gave themselves to him humbly.
If we lay all pleasures at the feet of our Prince, we can scarcely hope
he will remain virtuous. Indeed, we do not wish our Prince to be an
examplar of godliness, but a perfect type of happiness. It may be
foolish of us to insist upon apolaustic happiness, but that is the kind
of happiness that we can ourselves, most of us, best understand, and so
we offer it to our ideal. In Royalty we find our Bacchus, our Venus.
Certainly George was, in the practical sense of the word, a fine king.
His wonderful physique, his wealth, his brilliant talents, he gave them
all without stint to Society. From the time when, at Madame Cornelys',
he gallivanted with rips and demireps, to the time when he sat, a stout
and solitary old king, fishing in the artificial pond at Windsor,
his life was beautifully ordered. He indulged to the full in all the
delights that England could offer him. That he should have, in his old
age, suddenly abandoned his career of vigorous enjoyment is, I confess,
rather surprising. The Royal voluptuary generally remains young to the
last. No one ever tires of pleasure. It is the pursuit of pleasure,
the trouble to grasp it, that makes us old. Only the soldiers who enter
Capua with wounded feet leave it demoralised. And yet George, who never
had to wait or fight for a pleasure, fell enervate long before his
death. I can but attribute this to the constant persecution to which he
was subjected by duns and ministers, parents and wives.
Not that I regret the manner in which he spent his last years. On the
contrary, I think it was exceedingly cosy. I like to think of the King,
at Windsor, lying a-bed all the morning in his darkened room, with all
the sporting papers scattered over his quilt and a little decanter of
the favourite cherry-brandy within easy reach. I like to think of him
sitting by his fire in the afternoon and hearing his ministers ask for
him at the door and piling another log upon the fire, as he heard them
sent away by his servant. It was not, I acknowledge, a life to kindle
popular enthusiasm. But most people knew little of its mode. For all
they knew, His Majesty might have been making his soul or writing
his memoirs. In reality, George was now 'too fat by far' to brook the
observation of casual eyes. Especially he hated to be seen by those
whose memories might bear them back to the time when he had yet a waist.
Among his elaborate precautions of privacy was a pair of avant-couriers,
who always preceded his pony-chaise in its daily progress through
Windsor Great Park and had strict commands to drive back any intruder.
In The Veiled Majestic Man, Where is the Graceful Despot of England?
and other lampoons not extant, the scribblers mocked his loneliness. At
White's, one evening, four gentlemen of high fashion vowed, over their
wine, they would see the invisible monarch. So they rode down next day
to Windsor, and secreted themselves in the branches of a holm-oak. Here
they waited perdus, beguiling the hours and the frost with their flasks.
When dusk was falling, they heard at last the chime of hoofs on the
hard road, and saw presently a splash of the Royal livery, as two grooms
trotted by, peering warily from side to side, and disappeared in the
gloom. The conspirators in the tree held their breath, till they caught
the distant sound of wheels. Nearer and louder came the sound, and
soon they saw a white, postillioned pony, a chaise and, yes, girth
immensurate among the cushions, a weary monarch, whose face, crimson
above the dark accumulation of his stock, was like some ominous
sunset.... He had passed them and they had seen him, monstrous and
moribund among the cushions. He had been borne past them like a wounded
Bacchanal. The King! The Regent!... They shuddered in the frosty
branches. The night was gathering and they climbed silently to the
ground, with an awful, indispellible image before their eyes.
You see, these gentlemen were not philosophers. Remember, also, that
the strangeness of their escapade, the cramped attitude they had been
compelled to maintain in the branches of the holm-oak, the intense
cold and their frequent resort to the flask must have all conspired to
exaggerate their emotions and prevent them from looking at things in a
rational way. After all, George had lived his life. He had lived more
fully than any other man. And it was better really that his death should
be preceded by decline. For every one, obviously, the most desirable
kind of death is that which strikes men down, suddenly, in their prime.
Had they not been so dangerous, railways would never have ousted the
old coaches from popular favour. But, however keenly we may court such
a death for ourselves or for those who are near and dear to us, we
must always be offended whenever it befall one in whom our interest is
aesthetic merely. Had his father permitted George to fight at Waterloo,
and had some fatal bullet pierced the padding of that splendid breast,
I should have been really annoyed, and this essay would never have
been written. Sudden death mars the unity of an admirable life. Natural
decline, tapering to tranquillity, is its proper end. As a man's life
begins, faintly, and gives no token of childhood's intensity and the
expansion of youth and the perfection of manhood, so it should also end,
faintly. The King died a death that was like the calm conclusion of a
great, lurid poem. Quievit.
Yes, his life was a poem, a poem in the praise of Pleasure. And it is
right that we should think of him always as the great voluptuary. Only
let us note that his nature never became, as do the natures of most
voluptuaries, corroded by a cruel indifference to the happiness of
others. When all the town was agog for the fête to be given by the
Regent in honour of the French King, Sheridan sent a forged card of
invitation to Romeo Coates, the half-witted dandy, who used at this time
to walk about in absurd ribbons and buckles, and was the butt of all the
streetsters. The poor fellow arrived at the entrance of Carlton House,
proud as a peacock, and he was greeted with a tremendous cheer from the
bystanding mob, but when he came to the lackeys he was told that his
card was a hoax and sent about his business. The tears were rolling down
his cheeks as he shambled back into the street. The Regent heard
later in the evening of this sorry joke, and next day despatched a
kindly-worded message, in which he prayed that Mr. Coates would not
refuse to come and 'view the decorations, nevertheless.' Though he does
not appear to have treated his inferiors with the extreme servility that
is now in vogue, George was beloved by the whole of his household, and
many are the little tales that are told to illustrate the kindliness
and consideration he showed to his valets and his jockeys and his
stable-boys. That from time to time he dropped certain of his favourites
is no cause for blaming him. Remember that a Great Personage, like a
great genius, is dangerous to his fellow-creatures. The favourites of
Royalty live in an intoxicant atmosphere. They become unaccountable for
their behaviour. Either they get beyond themselves, and, like Brummell,
forget that the King, their friend, is also their master, or they outrun
the constable and go bankrupt, or cheat at cards in order to keep up
their position, or do some other foolish thing that makes it impossible
for the King to favour them more. Old friends are generally the refuge
of unsociable persons. Remembering this also, gauge the temptation that
besets the very leader of Society to form fresh friendships, when all
the cleverest and most charming persons in the land are standing ready,
like supers at the wings, to come on and please him! At Carlton House
there was a constant succession of wits. Minds were preserved for
the Prince of Wales, as coverts are preserved for him to-day. For him
Sheridan would flash his best bon-mot, and Theodore Hook play his most
practical joke, his swiftest chansonette. And Fox would talk, as only he
could, of Liberty and of Patriotism, and Byron would look more than ever
like Isidore de Lara as he recited his own bad verses, and Sir Walter
Scott would 'pour out with an endless generosity his store of old-world
learning, kindness, and humour.' Of such men George was a splendid
patron. He did not merely sit in his chair, gaping princely at their
wit and their wisdom, but quoted with the scholars and argued with
the statesmen and jested with the wits. Doctor Burney, an impartial
observer, says that he was amazed by the knowledge of music that the
Regent displayed in a half-hour's discussion over the wine. Croker says
that 'the Prince and Scott were the two most brilliant story-tellers,
in their several ways, he had ever happened to meet. Both exerted
themselves, and it was hard to say which shone the most.' Indeed His
Royal Highness appears to have been a fine conversationalist, with a
wide range of knowledge and great humour. We, who have come at length to
look upon stupidity as one of the most sacred prerogatives of Royalty,
can scarcely realise that, if George's birth had been never so humble, he
would have been known to us as a most admirable scholar and wit, or as
a connoisseur of the arts. It is pleasing to think of his love for the
Flemish school of painting, for Wilkie and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The
splendid portraits of foreign potentates that hang in the Banqueting
Room at Windsor bear witness to his sense of the canvas. In his later
years he exerted himself strenuously in raising the tone of the drama.
His love of the classics never left him. We know he was fond of quoting
those incomparable poets, Homer, at great length, and that he was
prominent in the 'papyrus-craze.' Indeed, he inspired Society with
a love of something more than mere pleasure, a love of the 'humaner
delights.' He was a giver of tone. At his coming, the bluff, disgusting
ways of the Tom and Jerry period gave way to those florid graces that
are still called Georgian.
A pity that George's predecessor was not a man, like the Prince Consort,
of strong chastening influence! Then might the bright flamboyance which
he gave to Society have made his reign more beautiful than any other--a
real renaissance. But he found London a wild city of taverns and
cock-pits, and the grace which in the course of years he gave to his
subjects never really entered into them. The cock-pits were gilded and
the taverns painted with colour, but the heart of the city was vulgar,
even as before. The simulation of higher things did indeed give the note
of a very interesting period, but how shallow that simulation was and
how merely it was due to George's own influence, we may see in the light
of what happened after his death. The good that he had done died with
him. The refinement he had laid upon vulgarity fell away, like enamel
from withered cheeks. It was only George himself who had made the sham
endure. The Victorian era came soon, and the angels rushed in and drove
the nymphs away and hung the land with reps.
I have often wondered whether it was with a feeling that his influence
would be no more than life-long, that George allowed Carlton House, that
dear structure, the very work of his life and symbol of his being, to
be rased. I wish that Carlton House were still standing. I wish we
could still walk through those corridors, whose walls were 'crusted with
ormolu,' and parquet-floors were 'so glossy that, were Narcissus to come
down from heaven, he would, I maintain, need no other mirror for his
beauté.' I wish that we could see the pier-glasses and the girandoles
and the twisted sofas, the fauns foisted upon the ceiling and the rident
goddesses along the wall. These things would make George's memory dearer
to us, help us to a fuller knowledge of him. I am glad that the Pavilion
still stands here in Brighton. Its trite lawns and wanton cupolae have
taught me much. As I write this essay, I can see them from my window.
Last night, in a crowd of trippers and townspeople, I roamed the lawns
of that dishonoured palace, whilst a band played us tunes. Once I
fancied I saw the shade of a swaying figure and of a wine-red face.
Brighton, 1894.